Why do phones come with SMS delivery reports turned off by default?
Delivery reports are a convenience feature that lets the sender know if the message they sent has been received (not read) by the recipient's device (for this, it has to be online and have sufficient storage space, though modern phones usually have so much storage the latter is no problem at all).
Every single phone I ever had, from early Nokias in the 00s to Androids and iPhones, had it disabled by default. While feature phones often delivered these reports with a pop-up and sometimes notification sound, which some people could deem annoying, this trend continues even with smartphones, which typically display it merely as an indicator in the chats list of your messaging application.
So, is there an actual reason why it's turned off by default everywhere? The feature has to be enabled on the sender's device to receive these and the recipient has no way of opting out of this, so it's not a privacy thing by any means.
UPD: Apparently, carriers in some countries charge customers for receiving delivery reports as if they were sent messages. I've never realized this - reports always were absolutely free where I live. Thank you for your responses!
the markup on text messaging has always been northern of 99.999%. it costs them almost nothing.
Even crazier is they take up almost no bandwidth because they were sent in the unused part of the control packet which was being sent anyway.
This is true. When I checked on this about five years ago (in the UK), the cost per message was about £0.00001
With the reduction in the number of SMS sent, it now costs more to bill them. In the UK, even the cheapest monthly contract has unlimited calls and texts. There a pre-pay tariffs as low as £3 a month with calls, texts and some data.
Sure, the marginal cost is basically nothing. Once you have invested billions in infrastructure.
Not saying 10 cents isn't outrageous, just that 0.001 cents seems low